Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

November 30, 2006

Searchweaver is a multi search engine that breaks knowledge down into several major categories, such as search engines, health, internet marketing, news, reference and so on. Within each category it pulls on data from various different engines as appropriate. Choose those that interest you and then run your search. Searchweaver then brings back the data essentially in a frame, and you click on each engine in turn to see what results they return.

Maybe it's just me, but this type of engine is getting really old and tiresome. Trovando has this down and sorted and if you want this approach, then that's where you go. I have no clue as to why I'd want to use Searchweaver, and more importantly, they're not telling me.

As I mentioned yesterday, I was involved with one more item, which was a panel on Where is Social Networking Software Going and What Will Be Its Impact on Our Industry? and the link goes to the Information Today weblog report of the panel. Since I was doing the moderating I couldn't do a report on it, but Don Hawkins has covered it well, though I should add that the panelists themselves were: Adriana Cronin-Lukas (BigBlog Company), Ben Edwards (IBM New Media), Matt Locke (BBC New Media), Ewan McIntosh (Learning and Teaching Scotland) and Robert Scoble (PodTech).

Link: Goodbye Google Answers. Got to this one a bit late, and I'm blaming being at Online that... :) The full story is over at SearchEngineWatch, so I'm not going to bother to try and repeat it here. I will however say that I'm giving Google points for this, because they have actually looked at something and said 'this isn't working' and canned it. Saves the rest of us a lot of otherwise wasted time and effort. Now, if they can only do that with their other products that arn't doing so well we might be getting somewhere by being able to concentrate on those that do, and have more confidence in using them.

Link: Zippy - The webmaster's meta search engine. No sooner do we have one search engine that I like then along comes another. Zippy is UK based, which is always a nice thing to be able to say, and it's got lots of interesting functionality, though primarily for webmasters, as the title indicates. On the home page you can obtain information on a domain, compare top 10 results for a specific keyword, and compare two sites.

There's a search box (obviously) and the results provided start with related searches from the big 4. The results themselves are sparse - just titles, but this can be expanded into a summary with a mouse click. Icons indicate which search engine picked up which result. With any result you can find out more information about that particular domain, such as the age of the site, IP address, data on the site from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Alexa and Technorati, with information such as backlinks, deeplinks, indexed pages and so on. Even more data is available however, in the form of the top 100 ranking keywords, server information, text information, phrases on the page, and textual content.

Zippy is of less value to the average searcher who just wants information, but to fair it doesn't advertise itself as that. It will be much more interesting and useful for web authors who want to know more about their own sites, and to assess any competition they may have.

I get to see a lot of search engines that have just been released and usually they're fairly basic, but every now and then I come across one that is really impressive. That's the case with Healia - health search engine. It's got a very clear interface (think Google and you're there), and when you've run a search you're rewarded with a dazzling array of information. Firstly you get offered similar searches, more general and more specific, with various suggestions. Interesting to see that this is at the top of the results, where you might expect to get the sponsored links (they're over at the side). We then get straight into the results, with title, key word in context summary, more from this site, and a link to the cached version. On some results we're also offered an 'Attributes' function, that details things such as 'advanced reading', 'privacy policy' or 'fast loading'.

Down the left hand side there are a number of filters, allowing you to filter the content, and a few of these I've never seen before. There are filters for/about Professionals, Male, Female, Kids, Teens, Seniors, African/Asian/Hispanic/Native heritage, basic/advanced reading, easy to scan, fast loading, for text browsers and interactive tools. There is also a search history for the last 10 searches that have been run.

But wait, there's more. Running a search for a specific drug pops up a little information box (think quick answers and you've got the concept) with more data. I tried 'aspirin' and was given information on what it might also be known as, data from MedlinePlus, an image link from Drug Digest, and a quick overview. Within the results I was given tabbed options for 'All', 'Dosage', 'Uses', and 'Side effects'. There's also a useful 'help' option as well - something far too many search engines are ignoring these days, and the option of choosing from 3 different font sizes.

Healia was created over a 4 year period under an award from the National Cancer Institute, and while this is obviously a good thing it does allow me to mention my only real criticism of the engine which is the strong US bias to it (as you might already have got from one or two of the filters) and this is a real shame. I'd like to see another set of filters for Geographic content for example, but perhaps I'm just being really greedy with it at this point.

All told, this is a really splendid search engine, with a great deal to recommend it and lots of fascinating functionality that makes it worth exploration if you're a health professional, and even more if you're not! Oh yes, and you can also add their search box onto your site as well, so give it a spin.

November 29, 2006

I've actually managed to get to a few sessions at Online, so I thought that I'd do a brief outline report.

Nic Newman from BBC Search gave a very interesting view of how the BBC is looking at and using Web 2.0 resources. The deluge of digital data is making it difficult for people to find the content that they want, so user based tagging makes a lot of sense, particularly with the BBC plans to open up 75 years of archives. He also said that serendity was important in the search process and people should be surprised and delighted with unexpected finds. The BBC Web 2.0 strategy is based on content being the most important thing, and each element needs appropriate tagging. The people element is also very important both in terms of tagging but also sharing content. BBC content particularly difficult given the amount of data types available - text, programmes, forums, other user 'play lists' etc. There is a need to combine editorial skills with the 'wisdom of the crowd'.

Geoffrey Bilder from Scholarly Information Strategies UK gave a very interesting presentation on the implications of Web 2.0 for publishers, libraries and users. He made a few points that I really liked, such as the fact that the 'edge' is the new centre, with an application being at the centre, with everyone outside that, feeding data into it, rather than it working the other way around. I also liked the way in which he referred to RSS, as he pointed out that it allows you to subscribe to someone's brain, or to subscribe to a collective brain.

I moderated a session myself on 'What's new in search?'. Chris Sherman gave a good overview of the latest from Ask, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, then went on to list some good Web 2.0 search tools (some of which I was unaware of, so I'll be looking and them and blogging them in the next few days).

Chris also talked about social search in a bit more detail, looking at 'why now?', problems of social search, what he sees as working models for the future, and future trends.

Amelia Kassel gave a good overview of the revenue models for search engines and the implications for information professionals.

Stephen Arnold gave a paper on the latest search trends with emphasis on enterprise search.

The next session was on search V discovery. I gave a paper entitled 'Death of Search' (not a title I chose myself) in which I talked about how search is evolving.

Amelia then gave another talk on New tools for discovery, looking at older tools like Furl, then moving on to social search and social bookmarking, library trends and innovation.

Tor Crockett from Microsoft looked at their version of advertising and gaining revenue, and I found this probably the most interesting talk of the day (mine included and with respect to the other speakers). She talked about what keywords are, keywords V concepts, different types of keywords, 9 concepts of keywords, such as Quality, Price, Product, Vendor, Location, Intended Action/Use. Although her talk was really aimed at people using adverts to make revenue there was a lot there of interest to a searcher, particularly with respect to that basic concept - what is a keyword?

Day 2 started for me by giving a 30 minute masterclass on developing websites, and I'm moderating a session at the end of today looking at - yes you've guessed it - social search and Web 2.0

Apologies if the format of this entry doesn't come out too well, but I'm writing it on my PDA with a keypad attached, so it's all a bit basic, but I hope that it'll do the job!

November 28, 2006

My Internet Q & A for the CILIP Update journal is now available online. Questions covered this month are checking domain names, MsDewey, and evaluating websites. I've done a few humourous sites as a tilt towards the festive season.

Well, hard on the heels of Ask advertising this morning the freebie evening London paper 'Thelondonpaper' has a full back page advert for Windows Live. The advertisement is entitled 'Does the world really need another search engine?' This really does imply that Live.com is brand new and straight out of the box, and it's quite frankly a fairly weak heading; I'd have been tempted with something much stronger myself.

Anyway, the emphasis is on all the fancy tools - 'wouldn't it be good if you could preview images in detail without having to click backwards and forwards to see them?' And '...great if you could control the amount of results you get back using a simple slider bar?' (As an aside, wouldn't 'number of results' read better and make more linguistic sense?) There's also a suggestion that Live can provide better maps and directions, and finishes on 'Live Search... gives you all the personalised tools and controls you need'.

The call to action is 'Give Live Search a try at Live.com'. Interestingly the only mention of Microsoft is down hidden away in the bottom right hand corner. Oh, I almost forgot, with an image of Mr Gates in 3 sizes - a sure fire winner if ever there was one! It's a very defensive advert, almost apologetic in nature, with the emphasis on everything >but< search.

I'd have to say that, of the two, the Ask offering is far more interesting; it's intriguing, slightly amusing, and with an honesty saying 'we know we're not Google, and you know we're not Google, so having got that out of the way let's carry on, shall we?'

Interesting advert in the free London morning newspaper the Metro today; 10 very reasonable reasons to challenge Ask.com. We're then given a list of some sensible reasons such as better algorithms, preview sites and related search, and then a bunch of silly ones, all basically encouraging us to 'Challenge Ask' with the possibility of winning prizes. It's an interesting approach - I'm not sure if it's been done today because of ONLINE in London or if it's just a co-incidence. Anyway, if you visit www.challengeask.com Before Dec 10th you might be in line for some instant prizes.

November 27, 2006

There's going to be light or sporadic blogging over the next few days while I'm attending the Online 2006 conference. However, rather than leave you with nothing to read here, and with absolutely no shame at all (since I want to increase my numbers - I'm sad like that) do visit my new personal weblog; Frivolity. It's where I put my humourous writing. Well, I say 'humourous' - it seems to make some people laugh. My current posting is about the dangers of smoking and children. How can that be amusing? Take a peep and find out.